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Everybody says that but I have never seen a study indicating increased housing availability reduces housing price. Where I live, growth rate 22% decade over dec

Everybody says that but I have never seen a study indicating increased housing availability reduces housing price. Where I live, growth rate 22% decade over decade for the last three decades, housing prices increase directly proportional to the increase of housing quantity. That is until an area is filled at which point housing values will either skyrocket or flatten based upon desirability.

joejerryronnie 5y ago
You’ve hit the nail on the head here. The desirable parts of CA are located typically along the coast with geographies which don’t allow unlimited expansion (lots of hills/mountains and water). No matter how many houses we build, the desire to live here for the weather/amenities/economy will continue to outstrip supply. Plus, it’s not just housing which would need to expand, it’s transportation, water, etc. There are no easy answers but the solution is not simply “build more housing”.
- 0x000000E2 5y ago
  IMO it's not true. If it wasn't for rampant NIMBY in Cali developers would gladly replace low density housing with skyscrapers. There's less space but you can always build up. But none of the Cali cities allow this. That's why despite California's huge population you don't see any cities with skyscrapers and traffic is so bad. Building upwards also solves the transportation issues. Look at places like Tokyo and Singapore in comparison to Cali coasts. They're are all space constrained but these places managed to fit 20X the people in the same space and they still don't have Cali level traffic problems
  - joejerryronnie 5y ago
    You could be right about vertical construction lessening the transportation burden, but there’s still the water issue. As an aside, I came across a Tokyo density map overlaid on a map of CA (Greater Tokyo Area, not just the city of Tokyo) and it would be like taking the entire population of CA and condensing it into the city of Los Angeles.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      What water issue? People are not the problem when it comes to water, the problems are industry, agriculture, large lawns, and old construction. Water usage in my small, coastal, mountain constrained town has decreased even as population has increased and number of connections to the water system have increased.
      - joejerryronnie 5y ago
        I’d be interested to see your sources and learn how increasing CA’s population will lead to less water usage.
        epistasis 5y ago
        Should have included those, apologies! Check out page two of this PDF for the statewide picture; our use statewide urban water usage is going down, from a peak in 1995, even as our population increases: https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf?la=en&hash=E233EA870DFB826F235B258177849300179E1B64 https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... I first became aware of this when lots of people were complaining about water use for a new apartment complex that included below-marker-rate units, as it seemed preposterous that <100 new apartments could have any significant impact, especially when the alternative is for the same people to live further out in bigger places that need more watering of lawns. Turns out that our city's urban water use had decreased quite a bit, despite a slowly growing population, as shown on page 25 of this PDF: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual-water-resources-report https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual... There's a lot of really bad and environmentally counterproductive thought from the 1970s that needs to be fact checked. People don't require a fixed amount of resources, they require a fixed amount of services, and we have gotten better and better at providing those same services with far less resources. This is the same as the hard energy versus soft energy debate from around the same time period. We don't care about total energy available to a person, we care about the services that the energy provides. So things like greater efficiency through insulating homes, switching to more efficient lights, etc, doesn't actually result in more energy usage. The same surprising (to some) result applies for water, apparently! Swapping out all those old, bad water fixtures, and being better about lawn watering, makes a huge impact.
0x000000E2 5y ago
> That is until an area is filled Thats the issue with your approach. Supply and demand will cause housing in an area to be knocked down and replaced with denser housing. Townhouses, apartments, skyscrapers eventually. In some places this natural replacement cycle is feircly resisted and local governments are bent to the will of incumbents. HN leans heavily liberal but this is one place where conservative "small government" lack of regulations works better. In liberal areas local residents will co-opt the systems for making local regulations to protect their own investments. In conservative areas it's more difficult to NIMBY your way to halt development.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- epistasis 5y ago
  I agree with most of this, but "Local control" of housing of this sort is generally a conservative phenomenon. However, the bigger effect isn't typical left-right politics but instead the class-divide of homeowners versus renters. Self-identified liberals are more receptive to nearby apartments than self-identified conservatives. But the bigger effect is homeowners versus those in apartments. People in apartments are far more supportive of new apartments, and homeowners are less supportive, and this effect is bigger than the political divide.

joejerryronnie 5y ago

You’ve hit the nail on the head here. The desirable parts of CA are located typically along the coast with geographies which don’t allow unlimited expansion (lots of hills/mountains and water). No matter how many houses we build, the desire to live here for the weather/amenities/economy will continue to outstrip supply. Plus, it’s not just housing which would need to expand, it’s transportation, water, etc. There are no easy answers but the solution is not simply “build more housing”.

0x000000E2 5y ago
IMO it's not true. If it wasn't for rampant NIMBY in Cali developers would gladly replace low density housing with skyscrapers. There's less space but you can always build up. But none of the Cali cities allow this. That's why despite California's huge population you don't see any cities with skyscrapers and traffic is so bad. Building upwards also solves the transportation issues. Look at places like Tokyo and Singapore in comparison to Cali coasts. They're are all space constrained but these places managed to fit 20X the people in the same space and they still don't have Cali level traffic problems
- joejerryronnie 5y ago
  You could be right about vertical construction lessening the transportation burden, but there’s still the water issue. As an aside, I came across a Tokyo density map overlaid on a map of CA (Greater Tokyo Area, not just the city of Tokyo) and it would be like taking the entire population of CA and condensing it into the city of Los Angeles.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    What water issue? People are not the problem when it comes to water, the problems are industry, agriculture, large lawns, and old construction. Water usage in my small, coastal, mountain constrained town has decreased even as population has increased and number of connections to the water system have increased.
    - joejerryronnie 5y ago
      I’d be interested to see your sources and learn how increasing CA’s population will lead to less water usage.
      - epistasis 5y ago
        Should have included those, apologies! Check out page two of this PDF for the statewide picture; our use statewide urban water usage is going down, from a peak in 1995, even as our population increases: https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf?la=en&hash=E233EA870DFB826F235B258177849300179E1B64 https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... I first became aware of this when lots of people were complaining about water use for a new apartment complex that included below-marker-rate units, as it seemed preposterous that <100 new apartments could have any significant impact, especially when the alternative is for the same people to live further out in bigger places that need more watering of lawns. Turns out that our city's urban water use had decreased quite a bit, despite a slowly growing population, as shown on page 25 of this PDF: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual-water-resources-report https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual... There's a lot of really bad and environmentally counterproductive thought from the 1970s that needs to be fact checked. People don't require a fixed amount of resources, they require a fixed amount of services, and we have gotten better and better at providing those same services with far less resources. This is the same as the hard energy versus soft energy debate from around the same time period. We don't care about total energy available to a person, we care about the services that the energy provides. So things like greater efficiency through insulating homes, switching to more efficient lights, etc, doesn't actually result in more energy usage. The same surprising (to some) result applies for water, apparently! Swapping out all those old, bad water fixtures, and being better about lawn watering, makes a huge impact.

0x000000E2 5y ago

> That is until an area is filled Thats the issue with your approach. Supply and demand will cause housing in an area to be knocked down and replaced with denser housing. Townhouses, apartments, skyscrapers eventually. In some places this natural replacement cycle is feircly resisted and local governments are bent to the will of incumbents. HN leans heavily liberal but this is one place where conservative "small government" lack of regulations works better. In liberal areas local residents will co-opt the systems for making local regulations to protect their own investments. In conservative areas it's more difficult to NIMBY your way to halt development.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 5y ago
I agree with most of this, but "Local control" of housing of this sort is generally a conservative phenomenon. However, the bigger effect isn't typical left-right politics but instead the class-divide of homeowners versus renters. Self-identified liberals are more receptive to nearby apartments than self-identified conservatives. But the bigger effect is homeowners versus those in apartments. People in apartments are far more supportive of new apartments, and homeowners are less supportive, and this effect is bigger than the political divide.